


Sequitur

by scioscribe



Category: It Follows (2014)
Genre: Original Mythology, Other, POV Nonhuman, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 14:39:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8894518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: It likes cars, especially the yacht-like American models; likes the spacious back seats, how quickly they run through their gas, how they provide the illusion of escape but not the reality of it.  It appreciates America generally: so much contiguous space.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesleepingsatellite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesleepingsatellite/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

Not the oldest thing, but old

(“We’re not too old,” it hears.

“Aren’t I a little old for you?” it hears.

“She’s old enough,” it hears.)

all the same, thrown off endless pumps and thrusts of endless bodies like one more drop of sweat, like one more drop of blood, a shadow on a bedroom wall or the column of a temple or the silk of a tent, a shadow of two people fucking where the shadow, the beast with two backs, coalesces, not suddenly but gradually, and stands.  Well, most things hate and despise their makers.  It lays waste.

With both its parents dead it is for some time nothing but a suggestive pattern in the bloodstains, but some things are inevitable: if this one had not invented the wheel another one would have and so it is with it, and so it is.

It experiences the heydays of orgies, of key parties, of free love.  It is indiscriminate, coming for prisoners as easily as poets, but the poets more often attempt to immortalize it.  Andrew Marvell writes about it, calls it “time’s wingèd chariot.”  It is enshrined in frescoes and on tapestries and painted on the walls of Lascaux caves.  David Cronenberg films its approach on Marilyn Chambers, the way it makes the water in the bathtub ripple with the breath it has learned to huff and puff so well, so realistically, while Chambers keeps her legs open.  Movie magic: at the last possible moment, she scrambles up, feet sliding on wet porcelain, it still partly submerged, and something happens, some camera, some boom mic, some spark, some tip of something over the edge.  By then it has died so many times, but that gives it a new sensation.  A taste

(“Do you smoke after sex?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve never looked.”)

of smoke, of burnt blue lightning.  It practices not having a tongue: it has never had anything to say and now it knows that sense will not help it, whatever they say

(“Of course I’ve never tasted myself,” it hears.

“You taste different lately,” it hears.)

and whatever they think.  Bad enough, to be lobbed back and forth between their bodies, between cunts and cocks, without assuming the limitations of them.  Their vulnerability is not that they can die--everything dies--but that they are so exposed, that they are so many clusters of nerve endings, so many cells gasping for oxygen, so many hairs prickling upwards, so many unanswered questions, so many forms they crave to see it in, saying, “Come closer, come closer to me,” when what they want to do is run.  No apex predators they.

Its life is long and it develops preferences though it would prefer not to, for it wants to be clean.  But it likes cars, especially the yacht-like American models; likes the spacious back seats, how quickly they run through their gas, how they provide the illusion of escape but not the reality of it.

It appreciates America generally: so much contiguous space.  Archipelagos and island chains bedevil it because after Chambers it hates the water and will not swim but must wait with borrowed feet in the surf until some boat or airplane comes for it.  In the early nineties, it is worn down by one woman.  Accompanied by drug money and anti-anxiety medication in small orange bottles, she travels back and forth across the Atlantic and fucks busily, hurriedly, extensively, on both shores.  She survives it and dies of a heart attack at fifty-three, halfway through lobster eggs benedict in an open, sunny Key West bar.  They say she died young.  It knows better.  It does not know she is gone until it is one degree of separation from her and then none, and there is no ocean it can cross to reach her, and there is no way for it to follow.

No matter.  As long as there is space between expectation and reality

(“You don’t shave down there?” it hears.

“But it was over so quickly,” it hears.

“I thought it would be bigger,” it hears.

“I thought you would be better,” it hears.)

it will persist.  It is everyone’s father and everyone’s mother.  It is an assortment of dead girls with straightened hair.  It is an assortment of boys with shadowed, deep-set eyes.  It is sexy, because then they come to it, because then they stay still like deer as it comes for them; it is sexless, because then they think it is powerless, because then they let it come close and are not afraid.

It has no identity and they speak of it only vaguely

(“Have you done it yet?”

“Did it hurt?”)

when they speak of it at all.  It is a nowhere kind of thing, a mostly unrecognizable kind of thing.  It has come to understand--it is the only real thought it has had over all the centuries--that its initial construction of itself was a misunderstanding.  It does not owe them love or hate; it does not owe them resentment or wrath.  There is no parentage and no obligation.  It was preceded, yes, but only paradoxically so, as if it purports to be the answer to the question of the chicken or the egg.  It is the natural consequence of life.  It follows.  It circumscribes.  It is the period that forms the sentence.

It is old, and it knows it is old because it has begun afresh to think that it is misunderstood, and in the way of the old it thinks it was understood better once.

If it had not forgotten how to have a tongue, it would say:

_that you hate changes nothing, that you fear changes nothing.  of course i wear a familiar face.  i am the end, and you always knew the end would come.  that is real intimacy.  that is as real as what started all this.  there was a time when you knew that.  when you foresaw that i would come on a straight path, unceasing, unerring, an arrow shot from a bow to your heart._

_the hearts that even now you cut out of blood-colored paper.  the hearts you pierce.  some part of you remembers._

_you could see it.  you were sure.  you knew to expect me._

_there is no love without the certainty of pain._


End file.
